The Viennese Girl

by Jenny Lecoat

  ‘So, spit it out. Turned over any good houses? Smashed up anything? Because I know how much you guys love doing that.’

  Wildgrube’s mouth set in a tight, thin line. His lips were too rosy pink for his pale face – it gave the impression he was wearing lipstick. ‘If you have some issue with my department, Lieutenant, I suggest you go through the proper channels.’

  ‘No, I think I’d rather say it to your face. Must be an exciting time for you, now that we’re shut off from the rest of the world. Chance to get properly stuck into the locals. Doesn’t really matter whether they’ve done anything, does it? We’ve got to show them who’s boss, isn’t that right?’

  ‘I mean it, Kurt. This is not the time nor the place. I suggest you go home before you get yourself into real trouble.’

  Kurt leaned into his face, so close he could smell the man’s pungent breath. ‘I’m going. Don’t much like the atmosphere round here. But I’ll be watching you, Erich – very, very closely.’ And with that, Kurt spun on his heel and marched from the room, pushing a young officer out of the way as went.

  Once outside, Kurt took a deep breath of night air, then sneaked into a nearby doorway to light a cigarette. He waited another thirty seconds, then set off down the road at a moderate pace. At the corner, he looked both ways for traffic – there would be few official vehicles out at this time, but it gave him an excuse to glance backwards. There, exactly where he knew he would be, was Wildgrube, cap jammed neatly under his arm, staying close to the shadow of the buildings to keep himself hidden. At his side were two heavily-built junior officers, all of them waiting for Kurt to get a little further down the road.

  Kurt set off in the direction of Cheapside, resisting the temptation to look back again. His heart was hammering. Beneath his tunic, sweat was prickling his skin and running in itchy rivulets down his back. In his mind he felt calm and precise, but his body was taking delight in reminding him that when it came to abject fear, the body always gets the upper hand. He thought of Hedy, and allowed himself a small, black chuckle. Love. The insanity it pushed you to. For this, without doubt, was true insanity.

  Hedy closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, and tried to focus on a comforting thought. But choosing one was harder than she’d anticipated. The warm kitchen at her old family house was too painful a picture … the coastal walks she’d taken with Anton too harsh a reminder of what was lost. In the end she settled for her and Kurt tucked up together in a warm bed, in some vague, undefined room, sometime in the future, the smell of him in her nostrils, his arms scooping her into his body. If she could focus on that, she told herself, perhaps the physical pain and horror might fade into her subconscious.

  She twisted her body a little, trying to ease the pressure. The space was cold and damp. There was little more than five centimetres above her head, the boards trapping her, coffin-like, in one position. Even the slightest movement caused a joist to press into her flesh, or a sharp splinter to push through her clothes into her skin; it also increased the risk of her falling straight through the plaster of the ceiling below. Stretching out a leg, or her spine even a little, was impossible. When Dorothea had announced that it was time, and had screwed the last floorboard into place over her head, the pitch black and confinement sent her into such a panic that for several moments Hedy truly thought she might die of fright. But she told herself over and over that it wasn’t really that different from the darkness in the attic she’d learned to contend with for the last ten months; if she could control her breathing and keep the dust out of her nostrils, she would be all right.

  There was one salvation: the tiny gaps between the floorboards allowed her to hear some of what was going on in the bedroom above. It gave her a sense of connection to the world, and calmed her claustrophobia. And she knew she would not have long to wait. Somewhere down on the ground floor, she heard the opening and closing of the front door. Then there were footsteps on the stairs, followed by the indistinguishable sounds of people moving around a room. A moment later, she heard the ancient springs of Dorothea’s bed creak and groan as they contracted under the weight of a human body. There was some whispering – short nervous sentences exchanged in pops and crackles – then all went quiet again. Everyone, it seemed, was listening.

  Hedy closed her eyes, trying to guess how much time had passed. She used to play this game as a child in her schoolroom, forcing herself not to turn and look at the clock on the wall, betting with herself. If she guessed the right time within a five-minute margin, then Papa would take her for ice cream on Sunday; if she got it wrong by more than ten, she’d have to walk home through the nettle patch at the side of the school road. She’d got pretty good at it. Now she calculated that a good half-hour had passed since the last discernible noise. Surely it couldn’t be much longer? If this idea was going to work then they …

  CRASH.

  The sound was so shocking it caused Hedy to jump, jarring her body against the joists. Her heart pounding like a kettle drum, she squeezed her eyes even tighter shut. They were here.

  The noise of the door being forced must have been audible four houses away. Kurt propped himself onto his elbows, his head against the bars at the top of the bedstead, and glanced across at Dorothea, whose ashen face was almost indistinguishable in colour from the pillow behind it. Instinctively she pulled the blankets higher and tighter around her upper body, horrified at her own nakedness, her eyes huge with terror. Kurt checked that his trousers were correctly heaped in the centre of the floor, then glanced down at the space between them. With an apologetic twist of his mouth he eased himself a little closer to her body, and Dorothea nodded her understanding. No point going this far and not making the final image realistic.

  They lay perfectly still, listening to the thumping footsteps running through the downstairs then bounding up the staircase. Kurt closed his eyes for a second, and took a deep breath as the bedroom door burst open. Wildgrube was standing in the doorway, the shadows of his two huge assistants falling behind him. His cheeks, pink from the night air, highlighted the twinkling triumph in his eyes. How long had he dreamed of this moment, Kurt wondered – fantasised about clicking the cuffs around Kurt’s wrists and dropping the completed file on his boss’s desk. But even now those eyes were zooming in on Dorothea, comparing her to the photograph of Hedy that the spy carried in his head, and sensing that something had gone terribly wrong. His face reminded Kurt of a flick book he’d had as a child, where a visual story magically emerged by running the pictures together quickly with one’s thumb; in the space of three seconds Kurt saw the shift from delight, to confusion, to disappointment, and finally, plain anger.

  ‘You, whore! Where are your papers?’ Dorothea, in a panic that Kurt knew was no act, whimpered and pointed to the chest of drawers in the bedroom alcove. ‘Get up and bring them to me.’ Dorothea obeyed, dragging the blanket from the bed to hold around herself, leaving Kurt naked on the mattress. Wildgrube made a performance of scanning Dorothea’s identity card, but there was no doubt in Kurt’s mind that the spy’s subtle, involuntary peek at Kurt’s exposed genitals, when he thought no one was looking, lasted a fraction longer than natural curiosity demanded.

  ‘You, Lieutenant – put your clothes on!’ Kurt silently did as he was told. ‘So, this is how you honour a fellow servant of the Reich, a soldier fighting for our country? You come into his house and screw his wife?’ Kurt looked as ashamed as possible. ‘How long has this business been going on?’

  Kurt sighed, as if reluctant to confess this final indignity. ‘Since her husband left.’ He risked a glance into Wildgrube’s eyes, and knew that the spy was calculating backwards, remembering some of Kurt’s suspicious behaviour, believing he was piecing it together. The man’s face contorted into a sneer of repugnance, but not before Kurt had caught one more brief emotion upon it – admiration.

  ‘If there were any law available to me,’ Wildgrube opined, ‘I would arrest you both now. As it stands, you will be amply judged when this war i
s won. You both disgust me,’ he added, before turning with what he clearly imagined to be dramatic effect and sweeping from the room. Kurt, wearing only his trousers, and Dorothea, still wrapped only in a blanket, remained motionless in the centre of the room until the footsteps reached the front door, listening to it open and bang shut. Even then, it was another full minute before either of them dare make a sound.

  Eventually Dorothea let out a nervous giggle. ‘I think it worked!’

  Kurt nodded. ‘I think it did.’ Suddenly embarrassed, he took her dress from the bottom of the bed and passed it to her. ‘Put this on quickly, you must be freezing. I need to get this floorboard up quickly.’

  Hedy stooped over the bowl, soaking then squeezing the cloth, moving it carefully over her body. Trickles of water ran down her arms, her chest and in between her breasts, making tiny path ways through the dust and grime then vanishing beneath her slip. She was painfully aware of Kurt watching her, especially conscious of her scalp with its uneven tufts sprouting where her hair had once been and her body so thin she looked like a young boy. But when she looked across at him he was gazing at her with adoration.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ he asked. She nodded, trying to indicate an improvement, though every joint in her body still ached, and it had taken her a full half-hour to stop shaking after they’d pulled her out. ‘You were so brave, you know.’

  ‘You must have put on a pretty good show yourself. Tell me again what happened in the club?’ He had already described the whole event to her twice over, but she felt like a child with a bedtime story.

  He sat down on the chair opposite. ‘I knew it was the perfect night. He’d had a little to drink, but not too much, and he was virtually pawing the ground, desperate for a chance to catch us together, prove his theory. Like you said, all I had to do was convince him this was the perfect opportunity.’

  She smiled at the thought. ‘You really shouted at him?’

  ‘Just enough to humiliate him a little, stir his instinct for revenge. Not hard with men like that.’ The door clicked open, and Dorothea slipped in like a ghost. Hedy noticed that she avoided Kurt’s eyes and kept her body turned away from him as she fussed around the kitchen, tipping more hot water into the bowl. Hedy threw Kurt a meaningful stare – it was going to be up to him to repair the damage. ‘And as for Dory,’ Kurt continued seamlessly, ‘that performance deserved an Oscar! I started to believe it myself!’

  Dorothea blushed pink to her roots. ‘I just knew that it had to look good.’

  ‘I really didn’t see anything, you know,’ Kurt assured her. ‘I kept my eyes shut as you were getting into bed.’

  Dorothea’s cheeks were still flushed, but she managed a smile. ‘It’s fine, honestly. I know that Anton would understand if he were here.’

  ‘More than that,’ Hedy assured her, ‘he’d be proud of what you did. Of all of us.’ Taking a small towel to dry herself, she turned to Kurt. ‘But is it enough to put the authorities permanently off the scent?’

  Kurt nodded with genuine confidence. ‘It would seem like a personal grudge for Wildgrube to continue pursuing me for such a private matter. He’d be made to look a fool. God knows there’s enough going on in this island to keep him busy.’

  ‘So we’re safer now?’

  He pressed his lips together. ‘Safer, but not safe. We still need to be careful. Though to be honest, I don’t think the secret police are our biggest problem any more.’ Hedy and Dorothea both looked at him, willing him on. ‘The islands could face starvation in the next few months. Fischer was at the club with some officers, and I overheard them say that Churchill is refusing to permit the Red Cross to send relief.’

  Dorothea’s eyes widened in horror. ‘But why?’

  ‘Probably thinks the Germans would take the parcels for themselves. But from what they were saying, it might be revenge – a payback for what Churchill sees as collaboration.’

  ‘Collaboration?’ Hedy stopped drying herself and threw the towel onto the back of a chair. ‘Why would he think that? Churchill has no idea what’s gone on here!’

  ‘Apparently the British Government are under the impression that we’ve all been rubbing along, and that things haven’t been too bad till now.’

  Hedy looked back towards Dorothea and watched the now familiar fury begin to rise.

  ‘What were we islanders meant to do, fight the German army with our bare hands?’

  ‘Just telling you what I heard.’

  Hedy’s eyes slid automatically to the larder, calculating exactly what was in there to last her and Dorothea the rest of the week.

  ‘How are we expected to survive, with no supplies and no outside help?’

  ‘The garrison reckons it can hang on till January,’ Kurt replied, ‘if it takes control of all provisions. But it’s going to be harder for me to get hold of anything for you. And if the Allies don’t push across France quickly, then …’

  Hedy went to the kitchen window, touching the blackout blind with her fingers, remembering the sights and smells of the outside world that she had tasted the other night. The kitchen suddenly seemed a great deal smaller.

  Kurt rose and slipped his arms around her waist. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. Churchill will have to relent if things get bad. We’ll all get through this.’ But there was little conviction in his voice.

  Hedy sighed with a deep resignation. ‘Who knows? Secret police or not – this winter may kill us after all.’

  The three of them sat down at the kitchen table, and after a while Dorothea brought out a packet of playing cards. They played for tiny pebbles from the back garden, sitting in silence, unable to think of anything else to say. Summer was over. The nights were cooling fast, and the sunsets were slowly creeping their way towards the afternoon. Far away across the Channel, the rumble of distant guns could be heard, occasionally rattling the windows in their ancient frames.

  Tick, tick, tick. The kitchen clock ran on its hypnotic rhythm in the darkness. It would be another hour before the electricity supply returned, and the last candle had been used days ago. Now even reading, the last pleasurable activity left, was impossible after late afternoon. Rumours in town suggested that within two months there would be no electricity at all.

  Hedy huddled by the kitchen fireplace, holding out her hands towards the warm ashes to extract the last heat. Next to the hearth, the log basket sat empty, nothing but tiny remnants of twigs and dried-up leaves scattered at the bottom. Dorothea had spent all the previous day ‘wooding’ on Westmount, collecting any small sticks and kindling she could find, but every able-bodied person in town was doing the same, and the ones with proper, sharp saws were walking away with the lion’s share. It didn’t help that even the paltry bundle of twigs Dorothea did manage to bring back was soaking wet, and would take days to dry out in the cold, damp house.

  Hedy sat back and listened to the rain beating on the windows and bouncing off the concrete in the yard. It had been raining for days, weeks. The wettest November for ten years, the locals were saying. She felt her stomach growl again, and the twinge of pain that she suspected was the start of an ulcer. Kurt had recently complained of the same thing – even officers were going hungry now. Last week he’d told her that a number of ordinary soldiers had been arrested for violent outbursts and theft from domestic properties. Hedy had wanted to put an additional bolt on the kitchen door, but Dorothea tried every hardware supplier in town and could find nothing. Perhaps, they reflected, it didn’t matter that much – any burglar looking for food was far more likely to target the farmhouses of the country parishes, which sometimes still contained the carcasses of rabbits or a few home-grown vegetables. No point in breaking into a town property that had nothing in it.

  Kurt’s predictions had turned out to be true. Wildgrube and his cohorts had lost all interest in Kurt since the abortive house raid, and had evidently given up on finding Hedy too. The three of them had slowly gained confidence that the soldiers would not return, and in recen
t weeks Hedy had started sleeping in the spare room at the back of the house. It was wonderful to lie in a proper bed and be able to get up in the night if she needed to, though bizarrely she slept more fitfully there, having adapted over the months to the life of a bat in the attic. Truthfully, no one was sleeping well any more. Who could sleep with a hunger so extreme it gnawed at your organs and pushed acid up your throat as soon as you lay down? Last night they had had absolutely nothing in the house to eat until Kurt had arrived with a tiny portion of German sausage and a crust of something no one would describe as bread. Two days before, Dorothea had fainted at the bottom of the stairs.

  Hedy heard the latch turn on the front door and Dorothea hurry in, slamming it behind her. Scrambling to her feet, Hedy went to meet her. They were so attuned to each other’s sounds and movements now that any tiny change of mood was immediately obvious. Hedy watched her fold down her umbrella with the two broken spokes, spattering raindrops all over the floor, and stand dripping in the hallway. Dorothea’s eyes were red and her mouth was pulled tight in a poor attempt to stem an outburst.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I just saw Mrs Le Cornu, the old lady down the road, crying in the street. Her cat’s gone missing. She thinks the Germans took it.’

  ‘No!’ Hedy’s hand flew to her mouth.

  ‘She says the same thing happened to her neighbour. They trap them and shoot them, apparently, then cook them at their barracks. I’ve noticed there are no dogs around lately, either.’

  ‘But that’s horrible!’ She remembered Hemingway’s fluffy grey face nuzzling her cheek and prayed that he had escaped that fate.

  ‘It’s all horrible. Everything’s horrible. I’m so sick of it.’ The tears began to run down her cheeks. ‘I was queuing outside the butcher’s – there was a rumour that they had some rabbit, but it wasn’t true – when this fight broke out between two women. A proper fight, they were hitting each other – all over a couple of rotten apples in the market.’